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Book Review
| The Futures of American Studies. Ed. by Donald E. Pease and Robyn Wiegman. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002. x, 619 pp. Cloth, $74.95, ISBN 0-8223-2957-3. Paper, $24.95, ISBN 0-8223-2965-4.)
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| The Futures of American Studies grew out of a series of conferences that Donald E. Pease hosted at Dartmouth College in the late 1990s. While only a few of the twenty-three essays published here were composed specifically for those meetings, I assume that the volume gives us a fair sample of work presented there. Nearly all were written in the mid-1990s by people trained in or affiliated with departments of literature, English, or cultural studies. The volume, then, gives us a sense of what the field of American studies looked like, at one point, to one group of deeply committed scholars. |
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These are not essays written for a wide audience, nor is it necessary that they should be. The authors address their professional colleagues; often they address each other. They are interested in the theoretical issues that shape the field and not in the practical questions that might bedevil those setting up programs in American studies. How, they ask, does the field of American studies imagine itself? What is the field's relation to the nation known as the United States? What is the field's relation to the university, where most of its practitioners work? And what is the future of the field in an age of global markets and new technologies? |
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Pease and his coeditor, Robyn Wiegman, have organized the volume into four sections and an "Afterword": "Posthegemonic," "Comparativist," "Differential," and "Counterhegemonic." "In an effort to differentiate their modes of temporalization," they write,
we have designated the rubrics comparativist and differentialist to describe the futures that have emerged out of the challenges which disparate social movements posed to the discourses organizing the academic fields. And we have proposed counterhegemonic and posthegemonic to specify the different temporalizations that academic knowledges assume when they empower the work of social movements. (p. 23)
The essays, in other words, explore work in American studies that moves in two directions: academic work that registers social movements outside the academy, and academic work that aspires, in turn, to shape social movements. |
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Most of the essays take a critical look either at the nation that names the field, at the history of American studies itself, or at the world of corporate higher education in which most of the authors work. The American studies we find here is critical, comparativist, and deeply uncomfortable with its own history and its own place in the university structure. The field is haunted still by its rise to prominence in the Cold War United States, by a legacy of the American exceptionalism that shaped the scholarship of an earlier generation of writers, and by its complicity with universities that exploit workers and train students to be passive consumers. As Pease writes, "The disciplines within the field of American studies intersected with the United States as a geopolitical area whose boundaries field specialists were assigned at once to naturalize and police" (p. 157). Working in a field with so troubling a past, so troubled a present, and such troubling ties to a nation-state, it is not surprising that many of these authors find it easiest to keep their arguments speculative, suggestive, and at a high level of abstraction. |
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Pease and Wiegman play up the importance of American exceptionalism, but exceptionalism is not the sole governing logic of American studies. Several essays offer alternative genealogies of the field. Instead of beginning with the publication of Perry Miller's Errand into the Wilderness (1956), they look to his "jungle epiphany" (pp. 6, 40–41n11, 452–53, 472–73) unloading barrels in the Congo; instead of beginning in the Cold War, they look to the intellectual workers of the 1930s. Imagining Miller in Africa, rather than in Massachusetts, has set scholars in American studies to studying the United States and its empires; starting out in the 1930s has set them to uncovering a past on the left more serviceable than experience as the intellectual arm of a Cold War state. |
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